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Month: April 2003

This looks good, and as soon as I get the 1000 books currently in my apartment shifted to their new domicile I’ll be sure to pick it up: Somebodies and Nobodies, by Robert Fuller, who is interviewed rather intelligently on AlterNet. Things I loathe about the cult of celebrity (the behavior of both those within and those without), things I love about the average New Yorker…

Have just seen 45 minutes — movie’s first 45, my last — of Shakespeare in Love. I now understand several things:

1) Blonde hair combined with the ability to use polysyllabic words (correctly or not) is so confounding to Academy voters that I’m personally just one cup size and a pink dress away from my own Oscar.

2) No matter how unwatchable the movie, if you mention Shakespeare in it some folks will think it’s important and be unduly proud of themselves for surviving the evening. If you can work in a Stratford-on-Avon joke to stir up some self-congratulation on remembering that obscure data point from junior-high English, you may as well just rent the tux in advance.

3) You can take the crappy girl-movie out of the Lifetime Network lineup, but…

The American sugar industry is threatening to lobby Congress to cut off healthcare funding — specifically, money for the World Health Organization — unless WHO stops saying that too much sugar is bad for you. The industry would apparently like you to believe that you can make sugar up to 25 percent of your diet with no problem. Right about now I’d like to give the American Diabetes Association nuclear capability. Don’t you?

Things I will heartily miss (a partial list): All-night laundromats busy at 2am. The view from my kitchen windows. The old guy up a few blocks who smokes outside and nods as I pass. Anthony’s espresso. Sunday nights at Arminda’s. White Castle at 3am and walking home after. Tsuki. All the walks I didn’t take. All the walks I didn’t take more than once. A lack of coyness. The tree outside my front windows, and the restaurant on the other side of the tree. The subway. The subway. Communicating with my next-door neighbor only through email, but still knowing she’s there. The subway. Car-free living. Every godforsaken apartment I have lived in and loved despite itself. Every minute until I come home again.

Dear God — the former Chief Privacy Officer at DoubleClick (those lovely pop-up-window pushing, cookie-plunking folk that damn near got lynched online by real privacy advocates) is off to be privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security. I will now be copiously sick.

“‘Hossam, bring the Kalashnikovs” — word. This is a nice little story from the better side of Baghdad. (It hurts my feelings how much good stuff comes from Murdoch’s Sydney Morning Herald, it really does.)